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Author

Uthayan Sritaran

Date of Issue

2009

School

School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

Now in current world design applications in automotive, aerospace and military, cellular solids such as foams either in regular lattice or irregular structures is widely being used. This is due to their light weight, strong and stiff design capabilities. Compressive response of these materials’ is exploited for designing energy management devices. Formations of sandwich panels are by joining cellular materials with strong and stiff materials. Properties of sandwich panel are of high strength, excellent energy absorption and light weight. The main disadvantage of cellular structures is very sensitive to localized load and indentation is the most dominating failure modes.
In this project, numerical simulations were carried out to investigate the performance of aluminium alloy foam Alporas cored sandwich plates when subjected to indentation under axis-symmetric conditions. The material properties of Alporas foam and Al face sheets, preliminary tests were conducted to get material properties of half-hard aluminium sheet and Alporas as the face sheet and core of sandwich panel respectively by the full time undergraduates.